UWoN (User Workflow Notation): A Visualization Tool for User Workflow Analysis and Modeling for Developing Healthcare IT

Abstract

Successful user interface (UI) design for healthcare IT systems requires a solid understanding of the users’ workflow so that designers can create a solution that delivers the “right information to the right user at the right time”. There isn’t, however, an effective tool during the requirement elicitation phase to document user workflow in a systematic, formal, and intuitive way. Here, we propose UWoN (User Workflow Notation), which is heavily influenced by formal process modeling languages. In particular, UWoN builds on the rich and rigorous semantics of the Little-JIL process definition language, but aims to make the visual syntax more intuitive to UI designers, who often lack experience with engineering notations. We introduce the idea of representing complex workflows with the “icicle” visualization concept and compare it to the traditional hierarchical tree visualization. We illustrate and discuss one example of applying the UWoN to model and analyze user workflow for a healthcare intervention application.